Slideshow: TI & NVidia Drive Head-Up Display Evolution

MADISON, Wis. — Perhaps you've seen a head-up display (HUD) or windshield projection in a car -- at tradeshows or in a really rich friend's luxury car. Even the acronym HUD looks cool (shades of Paul Newman). Who wouldn't want a car with technology that has mainly been available in fighter jets (shades of Tom Cruise)?

However, two things absolutely turn me off about past and current automotive HUDs: poor graphics (reminiscent of 1980s computer games) and tiny screens. What I want is a windshield-wide head-up display that overlays a fat yellow arrow to show me my next turn when I'm driving. I expect it to be somewhat equivalent to the yellow first-down line overlaid on TV when I watch football games.

A few companies, such as Texas Instruments with DLP technology and NVidia whose graphic chip is now making deeper inroads into the automotive market, say they're contributing to the evolution of the automotive HUD in a big way.

Mariquita Gordon, general manager of the DLP embedded business unit at TI, told us DLP technology can offer "extremely brighter colors, wider field of view, and much more compact size" than anything available today (typically a TFT LCD-based projection system).

Danny Shapiro, automotive director for NVidia, told us that his company's GPU is fully capable of producing smooth HUD graphics at a high frame rate. "The run-time engine inside the GPU processor enables real-time rendering of information" such as fuel level, temperature, or analyzed data coming from the advanced driver assistance system (ADAS).

In July, IHS Automotive called HUDs that can project an image that floats about 7.5 feet in front of a driver's eyes the "optimal display technology for cars." The firm forecasts that worldwide sales of HUD-equipped cars will increase from 1.2 million units in 2012 to 9.1 million in 2020. "Sales this year are forecast to climb 7 percent to 1.3 million units."

Law of physics
But Mark Boyadjis, senior analyst for infotainment and HMI at IHS Automotive, told us much of the market growth is still being driven by combiner HUDs -- typically small, translucent screens located in front of the driver. These devices, which combine a projector and a display, don't use the windshield as a display. Instead, they use a small flip-up screen on the dashboard.

Projector HUDs typically use a small TFT LCD that comes out of the dash. Light is directed to the base of the windshield via uniquely shaped mirrors, and a filter reflects the image. The image is projected on the windshield in the driver's line of sight.

As for HUDs large enough to fill the windshield and present an augmented-reality view to the driver, Boyadjis cautioned that those are still "10 years out." The problem is that a bigger projected image requires a larger TFT LCD, which can have heat issues when integrated inside a car. More importantly, a large device is hard to fit inside a dashboard.

I guess that's an honest factor to form your driving far more fascinating and not boring the opposite on the opposite hand the motive force should grasp that driving desires focus to ride safely. The Winter Soldier jacket

What is the technology behind the modern fighter aircraft HUDs and how is that different from the technology behind the automobile HUDs? Also what would be the approx. cost difference between normal wind shields vs. HUD wind shield?

My 13 year-old Cadillac has a factory-installed HUD which projects on to the windshield, hooked up to a passive infrared detector which is located in the middle of the grille. It works great at night, especially when on dark and winding roads with deer and other critters lurking around.

Yes, and as Larry and 3DHUD point out, the HUD could be used to enhance dark objects on a dark night. That makes a lot of sense.

My purpose for chiming in again is to say that from what 3DHUD said, it appears that the HUD image is using the windshield as a screen, then, reflecting the image projected by the unit under the dashboard. Pretty clever. That eliminates anything special about the windshield.

@sheetal, I respectfully disagree. See my response in another thread. I think this will be helpful for drivers, as it can alert objects that the drivers might not have spotted. Besides, when we begin to have so many displays to deal with inside a car (instrument cluster, radio, backup view display, GPS, etc) having an intelligent screen, in HUD, to display ONLY the absolutely relevant information the driver needs at that ceritical moment makes sense.

@Larry, totally agree. If the HUD could help us drivers see better, by highlighting a pedestrian or a cyclist in the dark or rain, this is definitely worth it. Before I began looking into this, I was a total skeptic. But when I realized that the progress of HUD is moving ahead in lockstep with Advanced driver assistance system (ADAS), I realized that this is going to be not just practical but useful.

If you have seen the computer displays for self-driving cars you get the idea for what should show up on HUD displays for the driver. This could be an opportunity to focus the driver's attention on what they should be seeing rather than distract it with what they should not. Imagine a display that implements augmented reality to point out a pedestrian or bicyclist with color-coding to indicate the level of attention needed. I could see this as an intermediate step before full self-driving vehicles.

Junko and others with concerns about the windshield... The HUD being launched with OEMS by MVS California does NOT require a special glass, or any coating *on* that glass.

Our HUD is designed to eliminate fault-prone or expensive features like coated glass, or head- and eye-tracking.

Once installed in a prodution vehicle, you - the consumer - should be able to call one of those ordinary glass installers and have your windshield swapped out the old fashioned way. Provided the installer keeps his or her hands off the dash-level opening to the projector unit.

Honestly, no good HUD for passenger cars will demand special glass. That is an invitation to obsolescence. Neither will good HUDs for cars use pop-up combiners either. You *can* use a pop-down or up combiner if you must... and on trucks and larger vehicles, such a feature may be completely acceptable to the consumer.

But in the luxury market, and eventually the mid-range and economy cars, you really must have a HUD that uses only the windshield itself. Only windshields with out-sized curvature would run afoul of our current design. Nearly all current production windshields would do just fine.

The trick is to float this HUD technology down inside existing automotive IP, without demanding that OEMs radically alter anything down there under the dash. And consumers need to be free to move their heads a lot, and preferably not use a combiner at all, beyond their market standard windshield glass.

The secret sauce is all under the dashboard, folks. The glass has very little to do with it.

@Descartes, definitely, the cost of a windshield will go up. But as 3DHUD was saying, the holy grail for HUD might not even be the wide field of view, which I had suggested in the article. Depending on what a driver wants to see on HUD and how he wants to use HUD, it could be a small portion of the windshield that projects that infromation...or alternatively, you always have an option to go for "Combiner" HUD, which will use a separate pop up display.